What Will be at Pebble Beach in the Future?

The Steering Column

November 2006
By
CSABA CSERE

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The Pebble Beach Concours has been drawing me to Monterey in August for at least 15 years. And I keep returning because the cars on display are always changing. Every year a different marque is featured. This year, Delahaye and Voisin, two French carmakers, were in the spotlight. Moreover, even in the perennial classes, a car is only allowed to compete for honors once at Pebble Beach.

Then there's the mind-blowing perfection of the cars that appear. The flawlessness of the paint and gleaming chrome on the typical Pebble Beach entry make the average Detroit-auto-show concept car look as if it had just come from a 50-mile journey on a dirt road. Even so, for the '06 event, the field was reduced by 50 cars to a mere 175 examples of motorized perfection because the organizers wanted to avoid the perception that the event was becoming slightly too accommodating.

There are no Ford Model As or Chevrolet Superior coupes here. Custom-bodied cars are the favorites. The fashion in the '30s was for wealthy buyers to specify coachbuilt bodies to be erected on high-end chassis, so the majority of the Pebble Beach entries are such unique creations.

Cars like the 1948 Cadillac Series 62 bodied by Jacques Saoutchik make it abundantly clear that attention-seeking flamboyance was not invented by music-video artists in the '80s. Sporting knifelike chrome bumpers and fender edges, a faux-cane pattern on its doors, and a purple and lavender paint job, this car defined bling nearly 60 years ago. And Saoutchik even conceived it without the benefit of LSD.

Much more attractive, although equally eye-catching, was a brace of 1937 Delahaye 135M "torpedo cabriolets" bodied by Figoni et Falaschi. A glance at their freestanding, bulbous fully enveloping front fenders reveals where the "torpedo" moniker comes from. These cars were only on display rather than competing, as one of them took Best of Show at Pebble in 2000.

This year's Best of Show winner was a 1931 Daimler Double-Six 50 Corsica drophead coupe. That's a V-12 convertible for those who don't speak upper-crust British. This huge, spectacular-looking convertible was powered by a 7.1-liter V-12 "Silent Knight" engine, which meant that it had double sleeve valves.

Invented by Indiana-born tinkerer Charles Knight in 1903, these were roughly one-eighth-inch-thick metal tubes (a concentric pair per cylinder) that fit between the pistons and cylinder walls. As these sleeves moved up and down, they lined up with the intake and exhaust ports in the cylinder block. This eliminated the need for poppet valves (the kind used today), which were noisy and prone to burning in the early part of the past century. They allowed large port areas and a central spark-plug location.

None of this technical esoterica entered into the Daimler's Best of Show selection, which was based more on its beauty, rarity, and elegance. Which makes me wonder what vehicles from the past 30 years will qualify for Pebble Beach in 2050.

What excites me are high-performance speedsters such as the Porsche 959, the Ferrari F40, and Enzo, the Bugatti EB110 and Veyron, the McLaren F1, the Jaguar XJ220 and XJR15, as well as Paganis, Spykers, Cizettas, and the Saleen S7. But the appeal of most of these cars lies more in their performance and technology than in their styling. Also, with production volume ranging from several dozen to some 1400 for the F40, they might not be exclusive enough for the Pebble Beach crowd.

Then there are the concept cars, which truly are one-off styling exercises: the Audi Avus, the Cadillac 16, the Chrysler Atlantic, and various Corvette concepts since the early '70s. But unlike custom-bodied specials that were built for rich patrons in the '30s, most of these concept cars barely ever ran and weren't released to the public because they met no emissions, safety, or basic developmental standards. Either way, that would preclude making the mandatory drive up the Pebble Beach ramp to accept an award.

Drivable customs such as Jim Glickenhaus's rebodied Ferrari Enzo, which we featured in our September issue ["The Beast of Turin"] and which made its debut to the public in a display of show cars leading into the concours, would seem to be a shoe-in for the future. It's exclusive, startling, and beautifully executed, and it has a peerless pedigree. We don't see cars of this ilk frequently, and that rarity will be what makes them the classics of the future.

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